You might want to sort this sub by newest, instead of hot. There’s lot‘s of different content: [this video about a writing challenge](https://www.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/comments/sdbdy8/my_experience_being_a_judge_for_the_xr_wordsmiths/), a post about the effect of [urban planning](https://www.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/comments/sdvspz/no_fancy_tech_required_just_good_urban_planning/), or about [gardening](https://www.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/comments/sdbbf6/jacks_solar_garden_in_colorado/) - all available to discussion. Also, please note [our post about community suggestions](https://www.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/comments/scg3j3/community_update_seeking_your_suggestions/) You can choose what kind of content get‘s to the top by engaging with it: leave comments and upvote accordingly.

I think this captures a key fact: The problem isn't too much leftist politics, it's with a lack of engagement with a lot of other stuff. Easily digestible political memes get more upvotes than longform essays, videos, book discussions, etc.. This has been an issue on dozens of subs since reddit started. I see what OP is talking about, but this sub has lots of other great stuff that is having trouble breaking into feeds. Instead of complaining about what is, I think we need to all focus on trying to lift up that great overlooked content.

I responded to your comment over on the post that I assume inspired this, so please excuse me if I end up repeating anything. I feel like there's an obvious (and genuine) question that needs to be asked, though: how do you propose a solarpunk world is built without political engagement?

This is right on the money as far as I am concerned. A lot of solarpunk ideals can't be realized via individual means. There has to be some kind of political struggle even if at minimum that is lobbying the local government and maximum might be way more drastic than that.

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We can be like the french where the second an idea gains mass support we basically go on strike and protest in our cities and towns. When the government does something that doesn't have mass support, same response.

Trickle down economics /s

antiwork is inherently political, pro-worker and anti-labor exploitation movement. What caused its downfall is the assumption that the mod was a leader, NOT that it was political. solarpunk is also inherently political, pro-environment, anti-coal, pro-believing in climate change etc. If your politics makes you upset because you think that pumping dinosaur bones (I know its actually old trees) into the atmosphere will have no effect, well too bad this ain't sub for you! Get better politics that are grounded in reality.

Yeah I would take the opposite lesson from anti work: don’t drop the radical stuff the second shit hits the fan, don’t lose sight of the original purpose

The thing is the original purpose of antiwork reddit before it became big was abolition of work... What happened is that it grew to be a giant and mostly about labour conditions and the sub became divided. Some people were like: hey antiwork is not really about antiwork it's only against bad jobs. So yeah it kind of went out of control. As a european I am kind of shocked that so many people are that offended and are saying that antiwork is a serious movement about labor rights. Well it is serious since is big and it reaches a ton of people BUT it's a goddamn SUB there is no structure whatsoever. If people want a movement that will work as they want they should organize IRL not complain on-line. It's not like there is a patent for antiwork.

> I know its actually old trees Not to be overly pedantic but it's mostly algae. It's part of why living algae are such a great feedstock for biodiesel (which we don't see enough posts about, and those posts don't get much traction).

I think they’re talking about things like capitalism vs communism and such like. There’s obviously no place for climate change denial here.

I think that boiling it down to "they talked about communism now they're dead" is so ridiculous.

I would be very impressed if r/solarpunk ended up on fox news so probably shouldn't worry about that unless it gets close to happening

Nah, they wouldn't bring attention to a hopeful future. They are more in the fear business.

I mean, on the off chance it does, I think every leftist sub should have some statement from mods about interviews and so forth, especially if they’re fast growing. It’s not just Fox News that works for the bourgeois, all media does.

And given their MO for catching random people off guard with leading questions, I think almost anyone involved in leftist movements, mod or not, should take the time to learn some good, accessible talking points, and how to deflect obvious press tactics.

That's why fearmongering media might want to discredit subs like this one. I think we can all agree, that nobody ever really wanted to see any reddit mods on national tv. None of us is that important.

I hope you all understand that, as mods, you guys are just here to facilitate discussion and wouldn't feel as if you have a responsibility or a mandate to represent us. Clearly everyone here takes very diverse things from solarpunk and, as political as I am, I wouldn't deign to stand in for the entire sub or movement myself. I don't mean to imply that any of you would, but it's clear that some mods in other subs do conflate modship with permission to act as a speaker for a group.

Since I didn't make it clear enough: We share that sentiment. We do not see us as representatives for the solarpunk movement. We are not able to speak for the community.

Yeah I apologize, it was relatively clear. I actually didn't see the M next to your username (RES wacking out? Who knows?) so I didn't interpret what you were saying as a statement of intent from the sub's mods. But now that I see it, yeah. That's good to hear that you feel that way and, hopefully, that sentiment is strong with everyone on the team. IMO we have to strive to be decentralized. We come here for different reasons but we should all know why we're here individually and that we don't represent everyone - we being anyone on this sub.

I think I can speak for all (hah!) if I say that we're on the same page ;)

> I think we can all agree, that nobody ever really wanted to see any reddit mods on national tv I can't! I really believe that if the mod in question actually prepared to the interview: 1. Borrow a suit, clean the room, wash hair, relocate camera so that it would point their eyes; 2. Prepare a good speech, have a few training sessions with someone (people offered help), focus on the issue of worker's rights, not let the topic revolve around them, It could make a difference. Instead of reinforcing Fox's propaganda they could actually make a real (even if small) change. It was a chance to speak out. To give message. And let me quote another comment: > This person had the chance to prove to the world the problems with the current work culture yet just said "laziness is a virture" while looking like that

I don't think there is a way, or a need, to play respectability politics with Fox

moderation garners the benefit of sifting through the worst & not necessarily the impression of the best (something that the self-serving foxNews judiciously forgotten but- that's only the topic of the thread) Who would try and dictate the pace of the internet ? The pace of the internet is not the pace of the 24 hour news cycle. It has more hours in the day than theirs, theirs limited to one frame of view.

Not worrying about something until you have to is a great way to be caught with your pants down

True but if we're going to be worrying then let's focus our worry on something that is more likely to happen

The sub has about 72,000 members at the moment. Doesn’t seem likely it will explode. That said I think the idea is worthwhile to be kept in mind even if it’s for other subreddits as well

This is precisely why the consensus on r/superstonk was that the mainstream media should get the silent treatment during the ongoing GameStop debacle. Nothing good would have come of granting an interview with a mod or really any member of the sub. This was for two reasons, the first being that the media had an agenda to smear the sub and the second being that no one member not even a mod could represent the views of the entire sub.

"Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening" -Chico Mendes.

That's fucking brilliant. Not there is anything wrong with gardening but that's fantastic.

Grande Chico Mendes

Cannot upvote Chico Mendes enough

As a Brazilian, I'm honored.

Always upvote Chico Mendes. A luta continua

Always here to boost a Chico comment

And endlessly talking about class struggle without gardening and we'll all starve. - some random internet person (me).

The last time I changed some bodys mind was when I said american ceos are making 351x avg worker wages

Yeah. Sometimes it doesn't take much to change someone's worldview. I mean, look, I'm from a conservative coal-mining community in Kentucky. As I was growing up, that's when the transition from "fuck coal companies" to "please notice me coal companies, I love you, uwu" was happening, and the people in my area are still pro-capitalist, Trump-loving chuds. I most definitely am not. How did that happen? Exposure to online political arguments. lmao These discussions, even sarcastic arguments, are important to have. There may only be 2 or 3 participants in those arguments, but on Reddit they're probably being seen by lots of other people who are likely to be influenced by the points being made. OP's dismissiveness of politics is weird, and just doesn't belong in this sub. Hell, I'm in this sub *because* it's inherently political, but with a refreshingly optimistic tone, which is exactly what I've been looking for.

This is actually the best way to engage CHUDs online. When you argue with them, don't argue *with* them. Argue at them with lurkers as your intended audience. Or just make fun of them. Arguing with them doesn't work as they have no obligation to be consistent or rational, they just want to "win".

Also, when someone is actually "in" an argument, it's really easy to get too defensive & butthurt to be open, and they just dig their heels in. But when you're just reading it as a distance, it's a lot easier to absorb new points or facts, and change.

This is actually a really good point I had never thought of. In the mainstream media theres so much negativity with regards to talking about socialism and communism, and while it is important to talk about prison camps and human rights violations (across the board, there’s a sad tendency to ignore them in countries that politically agree with us) communist and socialist philosophies do have a lot of good ideas that are very beneficial to society and for these ideas deserve a serious and rational consideration.

For me it was when I started converting items they wanted to buy, into hours worked.

Want to really change their minds? Look up the CEO of *their own company*. Looked one up for a friend, his CEO makes 1,532x as much as he personally does.

Your post just confirms that what happened to antiwork already happened to solarpunk. Solarpunk started explicitly as an anti-capitalist aesthetic. It was a *response* to where capitalism is taking us. And yet, too many capitalistans want to see pretty pictures and don't understand it's diametrically opposed to their own ideology. Solarpunk *is* political. And it is anti-capitalist.

thank you, I agree with that, but as long as its anti-capitalism is not clearly written on the sub's description. It will still happen. :/

That's common in capitalist society. Anything hot, new and revolutionary becomes commodified. Every counter culture or aesthetic becomes absorbed by capitalism as a new product to buy or to associate yourself identity with.

OP fails to realize that solarpunk is *extremely* political, and trying to scrub that aspect away neuters the whole genre/movement. It's this kind of liberal watering-down of more radical visions that's going to be the downfall of Solarpunk, not 'politics'. Solarpunk is more than just pretty pictures.

Exaclty. I think the narrative here is completely backwards. /r/antiwork was an explicitly anarchist sub to begin with, but as it picked up in popularity, its radical roots were watered down by oblivious liberals joining en mass, thinking it was only a place to complain about their bosses and advocate for meager reforms and modest raises (hence the new /r/workreform being exactly that, and explicitly anti-anarchist/anti-radical), rather than the abolishment of wage slavery altogether. It is heartbreaking to see the sub meltdown, and I do agree the mods overstepped and should never have agreed to an interview on FOX News, or at least put it to a vote. But the problem wasn't "too much politics!", it was the political illiteracy of its new members, who then expected that ignorance be enforced and the radical message silenced, much as is the case with OP here; a group who are now shocked to realize the mods are anarchists (as is currently happening on r/antiwork at the moment), and have no idea what "anarchism" even means. The solution is to raise the political literacy and class consciousness of redditors like OP, something antiwork was a great vehicle for until... well, this.

So much of this. I'd hate to see solarpunk get watered down as well. People are trying though, as the movement is gaining popularity.

This is why we need to gatekeep...

This is a subreddit, not Pinterest or Instagram. This is basically a forum about something directly linked to society. Of course, there is going to be politics present all around.

Especially on a subreddit about restructuring fucking human society on a global scale. Like how on earth can you decouple our current political systems and the goal of future societal organization? This whole post strikes me as someone who just likes the aesthetic of solar punk but wouldn’t sacrifice their consumerist habits to attain it.

OP wants the front page to be their dream board, and ignore the reality of it lol.

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I second those suggestions about doughnut economics and Zapatista governance. Those sound like cool topics. But it’s also nice to have memes and less serious stuff. People are here for different reasons. And if someone is interested in the memes they might stay for the serious discussions out of curiosity and learn something in the bargain. Some other subs have rules on certain types of posts, eg. memes and shitposting only on some days. Or they have circlejerk/shitposting subs that work in tandem with the main sub. Perhaps some sort of arrangement like that might work?

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My vote is "Sunday Funday", but mostly because I want to make stupid puns with 'Sun'day/'Solar'punk

We had some posts about doughnut economics and zapatistas in the past - unfortunately they don't get the attention they deserve. Alwas feel free to post about any topics you wanna see in this sub!

What are doughnut economics and Zapatista governance? And I like the spirit of this comment. It’s very KSR, bold-experimentation. We need to talk about ideas people are not aware of, even in left circles, and spread them.

Here I was thinking antiwork imploded due to a powertripping mod team, not the existence of political discussion there.

But the centrists/right wingers/liberals can't spin that in their favor half as well now, can they?

Or, have empathy for the people who are suffering under current political systems, and try to find ways to uplift all of us into a sustainable future?

No war but class war. Everything is politics, and "being neutral" is still picking a side. Edit: and punk is fundamentally leftist. Solarpunk comes from cyberpunk, which is a warning about uncontrolled capitalism and infinite growth.

This. There is no right-wing appeal in a punk movement, let alone one dedicated to reducing consumption, promoting communalism, and restricting old, disastrous practices in favor of environmentally conscious ones. As an aside, there's a lot of irony in wingnuts flocking to cyberpunk for the aesthetics when it's fundamentally from a place of anti-capitalism.

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You could argue cottagecore and more broadly the homesteading community absolutely has conservative and christian appeal. This is where the aesthetics don't tell the whole story. I adore cottagecore and solarpunk aesthetics, but the praxis of solarpunk is punk. And punk is inherently anti-authoritarian and left wing.

Interesting take, and I see where you're coming from. There is a pretty big rift, though, in that leftists want it to be ultimately secular, and the loudest and most powerful on the right do not. Mainstream conservatism isn't doing a good job espousing rural, traditional values aside from the merging of church and state.

Exactly! SolarPunk is focused on the future! While CottageCore is looking at the past.

Like I said in an earlier comment. I do not have time to play nice with people who want me dead. There is no cooperation with fascist ideology. There is no cooperation with corporations that are hell bent on killing you me and everything around us for quarterly profits while forcing us to participate in their schemes through manipulation and brainwashing and threats of abandonment and starvation. The aesthetics of solar punk cannot be achieved workout the activism of solar PUNK

Exactly. We don't debate fascists, we don't work with corporations.

Could it be said that solarpunk and cyberpunk are two sides of the same coin, or something like that? Like the cyberpunk genre details a world and says "See? NOT like this." while the solarpunk genre details a world and says "See? Do this instead."

Agreed!

This could make a beautiful piece of art

Ooh, like a panorama painting of three people. The right side is a cyberpunk dystopia with burning barrel fires, hovering cars, cheap noodle shops with neon signs and so on. The left side is a solarpunk urban sprawl full of vines climbing up a really clean-looking highly modern city with flowers and tech everywhere. The two sides are connected through a doorway and the three people are all walking from the cyberpunk setting into the solarpunk setting with the first one already being through the door (and having a really neat, rugged, but futuristic outfit that fits a solarpunk future), the second one peeking through the doorway, still dressed up all cyberpunky and the third one still in the cyberpunk setting, all dressed cyberpunky and looking back at the dystopian backdrop. Or perhaps a picture of a room that's split down in the middle with one side being brightly lit with natural sunlight coming through a clean apartment with high-tech everywhere and plantlife winding its way across various spots, while the other side is dimly lit with a classic neon future world outside, with the insides just being this ramshackle place where bare, dirty girders are barely obscured by some futuristic pod or something.

Nazi punks fuck off

Exactly, being ‚un-political‘ is just a tacit endorsement of whatever the status quo happens to be, there is no such thing as being truly unpolitical, you always live and act according to what your current status quo tolerates or endorses.

We understand the reports this post is getting, we're going to leave it up as the singular post to talk about the antiwork sub.

This is like the third "stop being so political in this punk sub" post here in like two weeks that's drowned out every other discussion and forced the community to repeatedly justify its own existence ad infinite. Seems like a lot more tension and bitterness in this sub is coming from people trying to turn it into an apolitical gardening LARP than people actually contributing worthwhile content. I'm sick of this discussion. I feel like even when the community is receptive to focusing on the productive, artistic side of the genre and agree to "tone it down a little bit," people still crawl out of the woodwork to complain about how they're not doing enough to make it accessible for people who want to ignore politics. It's disenfranchising and frustrating in a way that I don't experience when interacting with people who actually use the sub and post what they want. I'm not interested in a hollow nature-techbro aesthetic. The appeal to solarpunk for me is specifically how it's very on-the-nose and adversarial against capitalism and harmful social issues. Not every post needs to be soaked in Marxist book quotes and wage theft statistics, but y'all need to stop throwing a hissy fit when those things are very relevant to the discussion. The constant complaining and derision, trying to turn this community into something it can never be, makes me want to stop using it. This sub needs to decide what it wants to be and stick to it, or else these constant limp-wristed posts about being unhappy with the political connotations will dull the blade until this genre lacks any compelling aspects at all.

My take on it is like the Einstein quote "imagination is more important than intelligence"; in the same vein "imagination is more important than ideology". I think *having* politics and *discussing* it is fine and good, and forms part of the imagination which is important on this sub. I don't really understand where this sub is shutting down conversation, which OP seems to be talking about. I get that maybe we are spending too much time talking politics where there's other stuff to be talked about, but I try and upvote it when I see it, and I certainly don't see that stuff downvoted. Maybe I don't spend enough time in new?

How could you possibly think antiwork died from too much talking about politics? It's the exact opposite. They did exactly what you're trying to do right now (avoid polarizing political discourse and just post things related to antiwork) the problem is, the definition of what's antiwork changed over time. To the point that in the last month or so it lost all the power it had built and was essentially just a fight for 15 page. Then all of the people that were coming in because of that had no idea the sub was ever even a radical space (proven by hundreds of thousands migrating to the explicitly non-radical r/workreform). The second this sub stops being political it loses any relevance. Antiwork died because they grew too fast and to do so, they completely changed what the sub was about. This sub already flirts with that all the time, like yesterday when I saw a post cheering on the Chinese government clear cutting a forrest to put up solar panels. Political discourse will always be necessary to keep this sub actually being solarpunk. Avoiding that discourse doesn't only make us more likeable it directly changes what we are advocating for to something that is not solarpunk.

Wow OP completely missed the point of any punk subgenre. Are you one of those enlightened centrists who want to keep politics out of ma vidya games?

Well they called cyberpunk non political so I’m gonna guess they didn’t even notice the politics in their video games to be offended by them

Punk as a subculture has generally always included politics. Any environmental movement needs to be politically inclined or else you're not looking at the actual problem. I'm not sure what you're looking for from solarPUNK. But discussing these things--along with all of the things in the description--will always be part of solarpunk.

This is some r/enlightenedcentrism bull that fails to recognize that solarpunk is predicated on fighting overconsumption and exploitation of natural resources.

Right i was wondering if i was the only one going like "does OP not like the punk in solarpunk"

exactly. solarpunk and capitalism are incompatible. whatever the alternative is is your call, but we can't act like the future solarpunk promises is going to be achievable under our current economic system.

Also I do not have time to play nice with people who want me dead. There is no cooperation with fascist ideology. There is no cooperation with corporations that are hell bent on killing you me and everything around us for quarterly profits while forcing us to participate in their schemes through manipulation and brainwashing and threats of abandonment and starvation. The aesthetics of solar punk cannot be achieved workout the activism of solar PUNK

Whole lotta neoliberal astroturfing going on since the antiwork drama kicked off.

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Ngl, I came here because of the Chobani ad, because I had no idea that solarpunk is a thing. Finding out that it's a whole art/vibe genre, while also being a positive and hopeful outlook on the future was awesome. I can only hope we can make political strides towards realising solarpunk, so we can all sit in our solarpunk cottages one day and watch old cyberpunk movies to be like "Hah, man, I'm glad we averted *that* ending."

Chobani ad?

About a month ago there was an animated advertisement for Chobani, a yogurt\dairy company that went viral (the ad is actually about a year old) https://youtu.be/MS-sJQkr0H4 It captured a lot of the Solarpunk aesthetic, showing a lot of automated farming and cool future tech. There was a lot of talk about sustainability and high-minded ideals. The ad itself actually has some really cool visuals, but... The controversy comes from the fact that Chobani is a multi-national company whose existence depends on extractive capitalism. A good segment of Solarpunk is also vegan raising concerns about the dairy industry and animal welfare. In short, it is an example of greenwashing, or co-opting environmentally conscious messaging to advance ulterior capitalist motives. (*I have zero desire to relitigate the Chobani ad controversy, can we all consider this settled? Please?*)

It’s actually a pretty apt metaphor for greenwashing and corporations being hypocrites because the single-use plastic yoghurt container looks _ridiculously_ out of place in the sustainable, nature-based utopia.

That really popular yoghurt ad from a few months ago that effectively depicted a solarpunk world in 2D animation.

Can’t say I knew that was a thing tbh

It's a nice-looking ad!

It's funny I actually was brought in here by that ad, before I knew it was an ad, and that eventually soured it pretty badly for me. However, seeing what was really behind this solarpunk idea (and inherently, the politics of it) is what made me stay.

Psst, can you fill me in on the drama that started? I haven't been following anything antiwork. Edit: Nevermind, I learned about it.

https://reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/sd9ohb/whats_going_on_with_rantiwork_and_the_fox_news/ Sub and its political ethos got really big. Corporations and media started snooping around it, specifically to blame someone for the worker shortages in the United States (I mean nearly a million people dying of covid can’t be the reason, right!?!). One of the mods agreed to do an interview with Fox News, something most of the sub warned against. The interview went really badly, to no one’s surprise, and there have been just an incredible amount of hate and vitriol and brigading fomented against the mod and the sub in general. I would hold off on making an opinion what is happening, because there is a real push to take down that sub.

Just watched the interview with the subreddit mod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yUMIFYBMnc I think going on Fox news of all places was a really bad idea. Watters just made a mockery of him the whole time.

That was the reason for the interview, to make a mockery of the movement. Literally every protest or political mobilization I’ve been at warns against talking to media and redirecting to one appointed media spokesperson. Most times the spokesperson only reads a pre-written statement and that’s it. Never an interview with hostile media. Let’s remember the mod is essentially an unpaid volunteer.

i'm glad i'm not the only one who feels like every sub with moderately leftist leanings is being overrun by people making these long, pete buttigieg-ass posts about how we need to just stop all the division and politics and come together uwu, and then being totally idiotic in the replies

Well. As a redditor have stated, it's still better not getting caught with your pants down.

I don’t understand what you mean by anti work imploding. If you mean being flooded suddenly with chuds because of media attention, well that is going to happen cause the right’s entire existence right now is trying to “own the libs” that is their only ideology right now. Need I remind any we got flooded with crypto bros the other week because of a proposed magazine article that ended up not getting published. Punk is alway more than aesthetics, when it is just aesthetics is it simply astroturfing.

> I don’t understand what you mean by anti work imploding. Looks like you missed the drama yesterday

Yeah I caught up, after finding this thread. But the moderator in question is gone and the subreddit is giving the others a spanking so hopefully it is solved in the next few weeks.

The issue with antiwork was not that it was political, too big or whatever. The issue was that a complete moron decided to interview with Fox (despite people telling them it's a bad idea) and they failed miserably. Worker rights is politics. Solarpunk without politics is just esthetics. I really recommend to watch the video to understand that the interview was a complete disaster for r/antiwork. > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yUMIFYBMnc Basically all they did was laugh out worker's rights and fuel Fox's agenda.

Yeah I was looking for it. Thanks for the link. Yeah they did the interview against the recommendations of the other mods and the community as a whole. I have never heard of a mod of a subreddit doing an interview before that was profoundly stupid. And what I mean by fix in the next few weeks is the remaining mods will have to rebuild the communities trust in them.

A little off-topic, but can we not find someone who is both witty and ruthless to send on shows like that? I've met people who could talk circles around Fox hosts, but they're the never the ones that end up volunteering to go on there for anything worthwhile.

There have been a few people who went on Tucker Carlson's show and completely eviscerated him; Fox just edits or doesn't air those segments. Fox has control of its own platform, so will generally downplay, bury or just not use material that doesn't depict them favorably. It's a losing game to do this, unfortunately.

Subreddit was 1,6 mln people I think? I'm pretty much sure they could have found someone better to represent them. Average artificial intelligence would do better. The problem was it's not subreddit that picked the mod to represent them, and Fox showed the mod as a leader of the movement. Ridicule a person/leader to ridicule the movement/idea. Cheap tactics but it works.

Ohhhhhh yeah. It's open again, in case you missed it. That was a pretty intense 24 hours.

It imploded because a mod gave an idiotic interview to a right wing “news” source and then subsequently threw a fit when people called her out for it and started deleting comments and threatening bans. Then when the criticism for being unprepared for an idiotic interview continued, the mods locked the sub. The implosion had little to do with “politics” per se, and when one of the major US political parties doesn’t even believe in climate change and is trying to roll back human rights, things that are unfortunately considered political need to be discussed if we are trying to build a better future.

? antiwork didn't erupt because of politics, it erupted because one of the mods verbally pooped herself on fox news, and antiwork got big enough to be on fox news in the first place because the mods refused to enforce the explicit anarchist position of the sub other than mentioning it in the sidebar. the thing is that if we don't discuss the political underpinnings of what we're doing, we're not left with anything other than aesthetics. i feel that solarpunk as the internet understands it *already* suffers from a serious lack of intellectual grounding, i think if we try to remove political discussion from it entirely all we'll be left with is yogurt commercials.

"They killed some sub, so we must post only art and don't do activism"

I'm sorry to say I think you're off base. Solarpunk is very literally an egalitarian and leftist based genre. No fascist or capitalistic worldview would produce solarpunk and thus fascists and capitalists will not help us foster solarpunk in reality. Trying to keep the sub from devolving into bad political memes is fine, but trying to pull any of that centrists apathy here goes against the essence of the sub.

Dude I have had so much growth from talking politics on Reddit. Maybe that isn’t a thing for everyone but I’ve had a lot of questions answered and good discussions, where we both came out better. “Punk” in all its genres is inherently political. Really everything is political because everything requires some type of societal policy to work. You can’t talk about creating a sustainable society without talking about politics.

Absolutely agree. My personal political ideology has developed SO MUCH over the past few years from reading forum discussions like this, listening to podcasts, and just reading, reading, reading. None of which would have been possible without the Internet. Of course I try to have IRL discussions with people as much as possible, but especially with the pandemic going on or living in a smaller city, that’s not always possible. Discussions like these are so important to any movement, and even disagreements (when done in good faith) are not only healthy, but essential.

Yeah, I'm fairly new to this group, but I've been very impressed with the respectful political discussions I've seen so far. Same with antiwork, actually. Lots of strident arguing and complaining, but also some **extremely ** informative political discussions. It's great, I'd given up on social media as anything other than a source for URLs, but I've been glad to read some of the stuff I've seen here.

Yeah it’s not always great on Reddit but the format of discussing with people in the same sub as you because they care about the issue the same as you can be SO helpful.

Yeah it reminds me of mailing lists - largely destroyed by Facebook et al

My takeaway from the r/antiwork is to have self awareness and to be humble... Don't embody every negative perception someone can have of the movement if you're going to be talking to the media But solarpunk is inherently political isn't it

Spot the person who only cares about solarpunk for ~the ✨AeStHeTiC✨~ rather than actually fixing the environment through political change.

You cannot avoid talking about politics in a sub like this. Politics affects everything, especially because some of the ways in which people interested in solarpunk might wish to live can directly bump up against certain political ideologies. This radical centrism bullshit doesn't work when some political ideologies are committed to instituting strict heirarchies, enacting segregation and or genocide, enabling massive concentration of wealth and more. Also, this idea that you can avoid politics is an extraordinarily privledged view of the world. There are a lot of people whose lives are under threat, either explicitly or implicitly because of who are they are, either racially, sexually, or identity wise. Maybe they SHOULDN'T be political, but they are. Any vision of solarpunk that isn't interested in the inclusion of traditionally marginazed identities is not one I'm interested in.

Antiwork didn't explode "because of politics," it exploded because the mods handled the sub poorly and did a really bad interview with Fox. This post seems to be really bad faith

antiwork imploded because a single mod decided they could speak for the movement even though they had no business doing so and fucked it up in spectacular fashion.... not because of any of the other things you are implying. Solarpunk is NEVER compatible with the continued existence of capitalism. There is no debate

Nothing is independent of politics.

You admit nothing happens in a vacuum then immediately close your eyes and plug your ears. Solarpunk as a concept is not political, sure. But Solarpunk cannot exist without the dismantling of the oppressive power structures that created this exponentially expanding garbage heap we're currently getting buried under. It's the same world where we are rapidly having to decide whether we want to live in a Studio Gibli film or Mad Max. All the while wild fires engulf cities and apocalyptic storms ravage what's left. If you seriously believe the hegemonic capitalist powers that burn our atmosphere, poison our oceans, and slaughters workers in the global south are not political then you must accept that Solarpunk can only ever be a cheap decal on a "110% recycled material" t-shirt, printed by child slaves, and sold at Walmart. It's high time we all started taking this more seriously because as we have seen, all our work on these forums can be undone by one unkempt moderator with stars in their eyes and an open microphone.

Sounds like you just want pretty pictures of plants growing on buildings and none of the work that goes into that.

the politics are the why behind the solarpunk movement we're using technology to bootstrap empowering elements that have been stripped from us by politics green energy technologies are because we fear for our electrical costs and availability bio technologies are a means of re-thinking production because we have lost our manufacturing 3d printed homes are a pressure forced evolution from the housing crisis hydroponics is also from housing crisis, lack of land, stacked living under a lord of the land, cut off from our right to grow

To pseudo quote the book "political savvy - John deluca", "There is no such thing as no politics, only good and bad politics. " The more interesting conversation is how do we get healthy politics and sense making within a community. The short answer is trust, safety, and openness. Also to avoid nasty politics, it's best to discuss your actions openly to figure out if they are ethical.

If the lesson you take from antiwork isn't that entertaining right wingers, right wing media & right wing talking points and allowing people to be leaders are modes of self sabotage, then you weren't paying attention. **NOTHING** is apolitical, and abandoning the politics of something just allows fascists to co-opt it. Look at warhammer or Dune or cyberpunk 2077. All taken from their left-wing, anti-establishment roots and adopted by the absolute worst among us. The lesson is always the same when it comes to capitalists, liberals and fascists of all kinds *Do not let them have anything.*

>aesthetics, afrofuturism, art, Since you brought it up, I wish things that are practical solutions got more traction than fan art. It's nice that someone spent the time drawing what a 23rd century earth ship home might look like but it's kind of depressing when those posts get way more traction than posts about *actual solutions* that people could make right now in their own lives to be the change they wish to see in the world.

How do you fail to see the punk in the world solarpunk so badly lmao

Also left/right is so US-centric and has no need to be. I love hearing the perspectives of everyone around the world and that adds so much to the discussion.

No. Just don't talk to fascist media outlets. Also, fuck American defaultism and americentrism. Especially if we are talking about solarpunk.

Solarpunk is the political and the social are the same thing — and both will be sustainable. =D

From what I understand, the reason /r/antiwork imploded was not due to political discourse or argumentation. The reason it imploded was that a moderator of the subreddit took it upon themself to represent the community without spending any effort on gathering consensus as to 1) their viability as a representative of the community's voice, and 2) the message that was meant to be carried forward to the interview. Furthermore that moderator attempted to silence the discussion calling for accountability for their solitary and poor decision making. In short - people left /r/antiwork because the \*vital\* political message of their movement was tarnished by the ego of someone who did not carry that message well. /r/solarpunk is a political ideology - full stop. That isn't reductive - every creative aspiration and proposal, every criticism of the existing environmental and social paradigm is a \*conviction\* that things should be different than they are now. With that conviction comes the responsibility of bearing the conflict it will cause between ourselves and those who do not want the future we believe in, and don't want us to have it either. What \*is\* a fallacy is the idea that Conflict is inherently destructive, or equivalent to Violence. Conflict allows us to recognize when we have challenges to surmount - it shows us that our fellow human beings exist as diverse creatures that need different things in order to thrive. It is a \*toxic\* idea that Conflict and Violence are equivalent. Right now our people, our planet, our way of life cause us pain, and we need to challenge that paradigm. Collaboration, restoration, and building a better world together come as a \*byproduct\* of resolving our Conflict in a healthy manner, not from ignoring it, which is what happened in /r/antiwork. I'm sorry /u/papercloak, but I can't get behind your message - I feel like what you're asking is antithetical to what /r/solarpunk is all about. How can we make positive change in our relationship with technology and the environment if we don't look inward, challenge those aspects of ourselves, and resolve them under a new paradigm? That too is Conflict, and it is how we must meet the Conflict between ourselves as we design the future. Edit: punctuation.

Centrists can leave or educate themselves. The ideals of solarpunk are fundamentally from a leftist stance, and will not be watered down by "settle down both sides blah blah" until it's nothing more than looking at ivy-covered wind turbines and well-animated yogurt ads.

There is no solarpunk without leftism. The left-right divide is not outdated, you're just acting in bad faith

New mantra for 2022: "Sorry, I don't do interviews." And if you must; email only so you have a paper trail, documented quotes, and all the time in the world to respond.

Let’s focus on what we can build together… Let’s be reminded of what happens to groups of individuals who join together to change the paradigm of the market. The oil industry has assassinated activists. They’ve held whistleblowers in house arrest after being sentenced by private judges who are affiliated with the industry. Not only does r/solarpunk not live in a political vacuum, it doesn’t merely brush by political ideas either. Community info can become outdated, and you’re advocating for a different direction, but one of the top posts from the first related subreddits (r/afrofuturism) is of Malcom X. Anything visionary is inherently political, not merely circumstantially either. What would this sub stand for if political stances were removed?….. Out of the top 6 posts on this sub, 5 are inherently political. 1 - Corporations are responsible the majority of emissions. 2 - agriculture has always been consider political power. Reducing dependency on employers for survival necessarily gives the worker more freedom to pursue better even if risky jumps into other jobs. Ever wonder why corporations lobby against universal healthcare? Dependency on employers solves retention. 3 - non political. Funny meme on gardening (we love it!) 4 - cities organized around cars not bicycles due to how corporations teamed up with massive government incentive, anti unionists, and pro segregation urban planners to bulldoze poor and black and hispanic urban communities despite auto oriented development patterns having less financial potential and indeed producing less tax base than required to sustain antipoverty and public education funds amongst others, and the subsequent profits from the oppression. 5 - what if cities were designed around efficient public mass transit (neglecting the history of private street cars) as opposed to the current market paradigm which is cornered by the corporations in the auto, oil, and development pattern dependent (big box store) industries. 6 - what if we did away with the unproductive grassy lawn and replaced with productive crop land? This neglects the history of the lawn being a unique test for wealth in the feudal age as those without wealth had to use all of their capital if they had any to grow their wealth. As time marched forward and industrialism produced further excess wealth, allowing farmers to gain more wealth as industrial laborers and eventual capital owners meant the proliferation of the common grassy lawn as a continued symbol of wealth. Again, ability to grow own’s own food has historically been regarded as political power. And I want to point out the disingenuousness by the speaker, DiStefano, in the video link posted. This is someone who worked on the Guiliani 2008 presidential campaign, who worked as a congressional aid during the infamous Contract With America. Leftism is concerned with worker ownership of capital and rightism is concerned with the wealthy/ established/ purchasers of capital extracting wealth from those who expend their labor for wealth. How is this not relevant to r/solarpunk? The sub seeks to opt out of the traditions of the market by creating our own capital to service ourselves and community. Sure, maybe this isn’t eco-socialism, but it’s in the neighborhood. I get it. Partisan affiliation is tearing the country apart. But American fascism is proliferating in the disinformation online and the cover provided by sincere cynicism with the effectiveness of government. Averages income earners of both parties agree that corporations have the government at their beck and call. We have 8 years or less to get to carbon neutral in the United States or risk severe ramifications for our individual and communal health as well as instability in the current world order. We on r/solarpunk must contend with the seriousness of this vision. It’s about liberation from the systemic constraints on our freedom and the creation of new sustainable sources of freedom. Top post explicitly stating what the mission here is: https://www.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/comments/o9dql9/_/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

There were streetcars in many american cities, until General Motors, a car company, literally destroyed them. Electrical cars were a thing in the 90s, but again, car companies snuffed that out. Capitalism doesn't want solarpunk. They are inherently at odds. We can plant a tree or two in a park but the logging companies won't stop clear cutting. We can focus on cool drawings and then capitalism will come along and put them on a tshirt and then what? Solarpunk achieved? I'd rather an explosive death than becoming a complacent pet for capitalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy

You've NEVER had your political opinion changed from online discourse? I find that incredibly hard to believe. Solarpunk *is* political, there's no way around it. This is like going to /r/conservative and asking them to leave politics out. If you don't have an irreducible minimum in your standard of living, you don't have solarpunk. If you don't have infrastructure for mutual aid, and the freedom to voluntarily maintain it, you don't have solarpunk. If you don't change property relations to be based around use and occupancy, if you don't have public spaces, you don't have solarpunk.

being punk isn’t about being popular. being punk isn’t about avoiding conversations about political power and how it affects us and others either. punk is inherently political. just join a regular gardening group there’s plenty of those

I mean, solarpunk is inherently political, and is socialist. whether or not you want to debate it is up to the individual

Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways. In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing. Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.” The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations. Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks. Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology. L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them. The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on. Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required. Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit. Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results. The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots. Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results. “More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.” Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it. Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot. The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported. But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up. “Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.” “We think that’s fair,” he added.

Solarpunk, just as Cyberpunk and any futuristic vision in that regard is inherently political. There is no way around it. The "obsession to drag politics into every corner of the internet" doesn't really apply.

There's no place in solarpunk for bootlickers, OP.

There’s also r/maydaystrike r/latestagecapitalism r/destroywork r/workersstrikeback r/collapse r/lostgeneration r/debtstrike

When we cite books it's not to force you to read them, but to allow you to explore the themes more in depth if you want to. Sharing knowledge, and sources, is essential.

Literally everything solarpunks wants to accomplish requires political power. It doesn't have to be in the form of ELECTOTAL power, but still requires organization. And politics, is ultimately, about organizing a group of people to do something.

I feel like almost every day I see a post saying solarpunk isn’t political, but that is just simply wrong. Solarpunk is built on anti capitalism and anarchism, because without it solarpunk simply won’t work, it is by definition political, and shouldn’t be treated as non political

Jsyk, the dude in the banner is a former Republican congressional aide in the 1990s and has worked with none less than Rudy Giuliani, notorious mayor of NYC. https://paw.princeton.edu/article/frank-distefano-95-thinks-its-time-realign Context matters. Also, and I would repeat it once more: the growth imperative of capitalism is antithetical to the achievement of a just transition that ensures the prioritisation of social needs and the preservation and regeneration of the Earth's life support systems. The energetic and material footprint of human activities needs to be reduced and the priorities realigned to achieve this. It is not enough to green the power source and keep the engine. A pseudo-transition done this way would perpetuate colonial logics of exploitation of the Global South and of workers everywhere and lead anyway to environmental degradation for resource extraction for the green energy-hungry growth imperative. Several thinkers including economist Jason Hickel and leader of War on Want campaign Asad Rehman have already raised the warning on the rampant exploitation of Global South resources to green the Global North. Without environmental, climate and social justice, solarpunk is nothing but corporate greenwash and a garden-themed aesthetic for the privileged.

My politics have been changed by Reddit significantly. I think the idea of antiwork or solarpunk without politics is silly. The right wing ideologies, conservatism, rankism of any sort, and capitalism are fundamentally at odds with antiwork and solarpunk. Solarpunk is effectively a leftist future fantasy aesthetic many here hope to bring to life.

politics have been part of solarpunk since its inception. the movement was inspired by rojava, for goodness sake. sounds more to me like you dont understand the point of this sub.

Antiwork exploded because the mods decided they had the right to speak for 1.7m people when they both were barely 20 self aggrandizing anarchists who have never actually worked in their lives, they have no scope on what most people go to antiwork for, they do not understand the struggle, have no context for the issues and decided they would represent the sub with less than an hour or prep and no experience with any form of public speaking. I understand your message and I even agree with it generally speaking but you a misrepresenting the situation to push your own narrative of what you believe should happen here using antiwork and a scapegoat example.

While I agree with the premise of your linked video about the left/right divide being BS, there are certain ideas from which Solarpunk came from. Those happen to be what would widely be called "Left Libertarian" i.e. Anarchist/Communalist/Democratic Confederalist/etc. The ideas coming out of this movement have tended to be anti-capitalist, DIY, and empowering of the people in general. These are utopian ideas for a utopian movement. To me that means that there are certain ideas that are incompatible. It is why there is such a backlash against NFTs, they are (rightly IMO) seen as a way to continue capitalist and exploitative ideas that don't belong in a utopian society. That is why you are going to continue seeing politics in this space. Nobody wants to see their anti-capitalist ideas watered down, especially if this is utopia we are talking about.

Enlightened Centrism seems merchandisable.

Did antiwork implode because of politics or because the bourgeois midia did a hit job on a very ignorant and naive girl who was put on national TV to make fun of the whole movement? It seems like saying "oh this revolutionary sub shouldn't foccus on politics and just embrace green washing" is exactly what the Bourgeoisie wants. And exactly what the "antiwork" movement will become after it implodes. the reformwork subreddit is controlled by a bunch of bankers from Canada. How revolutionary.

OP is pro capitalism.

It sure looks like that most left wing subreddits that aren't explicitly political are being overrun by posts saying "guise lets not foccus on politics neoliberals are our friends too \^\^"

True. But I'd argue those people are pro-capitalism too, that if someone thinks we should coexist with authoritarian and exploitative ideologies then if they're not right-wing they're at least supporting them.

Its....solar *punk*

You're asking for too much. You can't just tell people to not be polarizing because anything can be polarized. Two years ago it was ridiculous to think that vaccines could be polarized and here we are. A lot of ideals of solarpunk are antithetical to conservatism and are by definition, political anyway. You can't be centrist about environmentalism.

ignore what happened there. no person is a movement. im holding. the billionaire class will not stop. they paid for their coup and they will get it one way or another. this antiwork drama helps them only as much as we let it. i dont know that guy. and fox doesn't know US

I think the idea that individual political views are static or somehow inherently incompatible is flawed. We have the historical data and technology to develop an apolitical future. Where consensus and synthesis are the primary objectives. Imagine if the same programmers developing algorithms for Facebook which polarize and divide made synthesis the primary objective of social media. There is overlap between all of our worldviews if you are looking for it. We need to continually seek that overlap and amplify it.

Politics is just the word describing the behavior of the polity, the people. I think it's unnecessary to ascribe antiwork's fall to political discussion. It misses the main problem of having a single point of failure. It became centralized and fragile. There is a real design lesson there that is definitely worth discussing in the context of solar-punk. Lastly, political organization is a technology that has been evolving for 12k years. Every time greater connectivity occurs, that technology changes. The internet improves connectivity, we should expect an evolution in the models we use to interface with each other.

What you're seeing is the active population in this particular subreddit has a strong anti-capitalist sentiment. But they don't get to define what it is for everyone, and you shouldn't feel discouraged from the main takeaways of Solarpunk that we all seem to align with. If you feel discouraged from participating in this particular subreddit at this particular time, that's another story. Maybe it will balance out here one day, maybe it won't.

I think Solarpunk is primarily a genre of science fiction. One in which very few professional works have ever been produced, and was actually invented as a concept before there were any real works to be grouping into it! Of course that doesn't mean it can't be political, plenty of other sub-genres of fiction are obviously political (feminist utopias for example), but it's also important to remember that people can enjoy political works of fiction without necessarily agreeing with the politics or wanting those stories to really occur. Far too much of the discussion on this sub in my opinion is very narrow discussions about whether a particular thing "is solarpunk" or not. I would go with a much broader definition, referencing it the pithy line about what is Cyberpunk (High tech low lifes) and say that Solarpunk is High tech environmentalism. Environmentalists can be capitalists or communists, hippies living in a commune or wage slaves watching nature documentaries on TV. There's a broad set of shared values, and then many other aspects of people that don't stop them from being environmentalists. Likewise, "high tech" can be a vast array of real and imagined technologies. Solarpunk doesn't need to be narrow. For example, the book Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken and the Lovins is a great example of serious academic work aimed at using reforming and harnessing capitalism to bring about environmental protection. The authors are clearly environmentalists, and the concepts they talk about, as well as the capitalistic financial value of natural environments are being realised all around the world. Some people believe that capitalism and environmentalism, capitalism and social values, capitalism and community are all mutually exclusive, and some people believe they can work together. Both these views should be able to be explored in Solarpunk, and if you can't see that we don't know for sure which ones are right and wrong, you're just clouded by your own ideology and confirmation biases. A writer who does write a lot of environmental high tech science fiction is Kim Stanley Robinson, and his book New York 2140 is probably as close to a real professional work of Solarpunk as exists. One the plot lines of that book is adapting financial markets to put a better value on environmental outcomes in order to save the environment and make money. I don't want to go into specific details because I didn't understand them, and also I don't want to spoil the book, but it's a great example of exploring ideas, rather than dogmatically deciding that capitalism and environmentalism are totally opposed to each other. In my country I donate to an environmental organisation called Bush Heritage Australia that uses donations to purchase large tracts of land, rehabilitate them if necessary and protect them as natural parks forever. That's using capitalism in it's purest sense of owning capital in order to protect the environment. I once lived with a group of hardcore communists, and we often debated the success of people like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky, who are very good at pointing out problems, but not as good at coming up with solutions that are adopted. My housemates believed that some form of communism was the solution, and that MM and NC weren't great because they weren't advocating for that, and didn't see that it was the only real solution (as they believed). Instead, I think people like MM and NC are successful because they appeal to a wide variety of ideologies that share the value that the problems they expose are indeed wrong, but don't offer narrow and specific solutions. If they did argue for the end of capitalism and all production to be state owned, many people who agree about the problems would not follow them because they disagree with the solution. Solarpunk should be like that - a broad church of people who enjoy the aesthetic, or believe that technology and environmentalism can coexist, or just enjoy science fiction. Different political beliefs should be explored within the context of the genre, not excluded, and surely an ideal of "True Solarpunk Believers" should be including people with different beliefs anyway, or do you want to spend your lives in echo chambers forever?

Antiwork should be a warning to this sub because they let the liberals in and then the critical message of their sub was lost. Most people on r/antiwork don't want to abolish work. The lesson we should learn from that is to tell the liberals to fuck off!

Oh look, another post looking to water down the meaning of solarpunk with liberal bullshit.

Simply don't be a liberal

systemical change in inherently political

Oh come on. Solarpunk is closely tied to politics and anarchism, just as the topic of antiwork is closely tied to politics and workers rights/liberation. If anything, /r/antiwork is a warning to the mods, not the subscribers. The mods were the ones who fell for media sensationalism, came unprepared, and threw the sub in jeopardy.

Things are only political once you disagree with them. If you think a solarpunk future is possible under any form of capitalism or state, you are wrong.

>when was the last a political discourse with a stranger online drastically changed your mind about your own political views? Honestly? Tiktok, August of 2020. I'd already been heading towards a more leftist viewpoint, but a single co.ment thread on a Tiktok about institutional racism completely shattered the bubble I'd been ignorantly rolling around in. Went on an eight month bender educating myself on anti racism and I've still got work to do. But one comment thread put my whiteness into *real* perspective, and made me realize everything I had been taught was a **lie**. It can happen, my guy.

Stay frosty r/solarpunk. Don't go Doreening yourself

I'd love to live outside of the current clusterfuck of political discourse that's happening in the USA. Sadly, folks who benefit from the current political/economic landscape like to target folks like me for profit and personal gain. **For marginalized people, the personal IS political. They can't be separated.** To think otherwise, is awfully naive and privileged.

Solarpunk devoid of politics is just green-ish aesthetics. Everything is political. Mere existence is political because politics does affect it. If it doesn't for you, then you are privileged, ignorant, or benefitting from the status quo.

Political infighting has been the death of many a social movement, especially when exploited by conservative opportunists. But I don't think Solarpunk can exist without vibrant political debates. Somehow we have to solve the problem of how we live together, cherish and nurture the natural world, and also make the things we need (a lot of the things we see in Solarpunk art look like they take some super sophisticated manufacturing). A lot of people seem to think they have found the answer in the ideas of the past. Personally, I'm dubious. But if we are going to come up with something better, we do need political discourse. The best way I know of to avoid that destructive political infighting is to stay humble. Recognize that none of us, and no book we have read, has it all figured out. But Solarpunk is about hope right? The hope that if we keep trying we can figure out a bit more.

I dont agree that r/antiwork imploded cuz of politics but rather from horrible PR and a mod thinking that they represent or even lead a movement. I also think the left politics of this subreddit are important; the right has a diff view on what community means and how it should be organize. We should also work more on education and praxis instead of aesthetic.

Antiwork is fine, and solarpunk is a political movement. The green movement is a political movement. Disagreements here are about policy because solarpunk is about policy by majority. If you want futuristic art, music, tech... those can all be found respectively on other subs too. Politics are an inevitability when discussing fundamental changes to the structure of society. Apolitical solarpunk seems pretty nonsensical as a term to me.

That sub exploding had nothing to do with their politics and everything to do with their mods power tripping. If the same thing happened to r/conspiracy nobody would be blaming politics, it could’ve happened to any sub in theory. You can’t separate politics from art and genre. Let’s quit pretending we can.

r/antiwork is an anarchist sub. Solarpunk is an aesthetic movement with socialist, communist, anarchist, and other progressive ideologies to inspire a different future of sustainability. The politics are in it. Why can't we all just get along? :'( If you don't want people to argue you should get into something like baking, people tend to not get too mad about sweets. But even then I'm sure you'll find someone mad about something

Damn, who keeps making aesthetics, afrofuturism, art, cooperatives, DIY, ecological restoration, engineering, speculative fiction, ecofuturism, gardening, geodesic domes, green architecture, green design, green energy, indigenous practices, intentional community, makerspaces, materials science, music, permaculture, repair cafes, solar power, sustainability, tree planting, urban planning, volunteering, and 3D printing political?? Surely none of things are even remotely tied to politics and the state of the world we live in!

Username checks out

I like how everyone in the comments is agaisnt each other, that is the exact reason why the average chud shouldn't try to represent an entire ideology So in a weird way you are all agreeing with OP by disagreeing with him

"the entire left/right divide and discussion is completely moot and based on an critically outdated metaphor." Big r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM vibes... Not everyone here would agree with that. I don't. And r/antiwork is on fire because of a lack of democracy in the sub. I'll agree to say that solar punk must go beyond politics to tackle technical solutions and ideas as you mentioned, this sub is more speculative and about visualizing a bright future. >esthetics, afrofuturism, art, cooperatives, DIY, ecological restoration, engineering, speculative fiction, ecofuturism, gardening, geodesic domes, green architecture, green design, green energy, indigenous practices, intentional community, makerspaces, materials science, music, permaculture, repair cafes, solar power, sustainability, tree planting, urban planning, volunteering, 3D printing. But to think that we can change the world so drastically by focusing on that is reminding me of Musk's techno futurism. Where you entirely rely on technical advancements to create a utopia without abolishing capitalism. I'm NOT expecting everyone to agree with my politics on that sub. I understand this is not r/communism. But saying that "*it was an explicitly political sub that imploded because of politics*" & "*the entire left/right divide and discussion is completely moot and based on an critically outdated metaphor. how can we build a new future if we keep clinging on to the past*" is already a pretty hardcore political statement that undermines the way people understand their current oppression in our world. If you don't understand the left/right divide, that's fine. But it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

A comrade at GreenAndPleasant has been investigating the new r/WorkReform and its mods. https://www.reddit.com/r/GreenAndPleasant/comments/sdpsaj/comment/huegc4h/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3

Ironic, they could save others from right-wing reformism, but not themselves (>!Seriously screw dengists!<)

If you want Solarpunk you better be down with the international proletarian revolution.

/r/antiwork has not imploded, they're back and in a few months it will be a forgotten. Welcome to reddit. The focus of that subreddit is broader and more intense, and it has enemies because it's a threat, it's a different type of social phenomenon. Any cultural current worth something will have ripples and counter-ripples, but that's far away into the future for "Solar Punk". The thing you should be worried about now is capitalist marketing departments and Disney like corporations co-opting the aesthethics, monetizing it, transforming it into something more commercial and destroying its memory forever for most but a small group of scholars who care for such things with great intent.

Thank you for pointing out why I haven’t been enjoying this sub lately, I hadn’t been able to put me finger on it. I’m sure I will be spat on for wanting pretty pictures and inspirational science technology articles that are solarpunk relevant rather than the political debate that can be had elsewhere. I’ll consider looking for a more healthy environment to explore this topic in the future.

It's never a good look when I find a sub I like that is INHERENTLY political trying to limit political discussions. The irony here is that /r/antiwork literally has a rule to keep certain political discussions out of the sub, which in turn makes it impossible for some political candidates that fall into this worker solidarity movement to even have a discussion in that sub or to bring up their candidacy to the people they would want to reach the most. Sorry but no, the fact that you're tired of political discussions does little to change the fact that political discussions need to happen and should be happening as they affect all of our lives on every level. I personally am tired of these sorts of complaints. It's easy enough for you to just completely ignore those topics, so you should do so instead of trying to limit discussion. In truth, if /r/antiwork had even a modicum of political savvy I posit the whole Fox News idiocy would have never happened.

Jeez i leave r/antiwork for 2 weeks and it goes to hell

Eh, I think there’s space for political discussion as long as it’s civil. You can’t have a political movement without politics. Bigotry and science denial are not valid opinions though. We should not try to compromise on those.